Anchal Vohra writes about the effects of pointless U.S. and other Western sanctions on Syria:
The country’s economy collapsed as a result of devastation caused by war, decades-long corruption by the Assad government, and the crash of the banking sector in Lebanon, in which not just Lebanese but Syrians too lost their deposits. But Western sanctions that banned reconstruction of any sort, including of power plants and pulverized cities, certainly exacerbated Syrians’ miseries and eliminated any chance of recovery.
Syria sanctions are part of a pattern of U.S. economic warfare that inflicts even more damage on countries that are already suffering greatly. Like the “maximum pressure” campaign on Venezuela and the policy decisions that have effectively cut Afghanistan off from the rest of the world, broad sanctions on Syria worsen already bad conditions. They further punish a population that has had to endure a decade of conflict and dislocation. This is not a “side effect” or an unforeseeable consequence of imposing sanctions. Hurting the population is what these sanctions are designed to do, and there is no way that broad sanctions wouldn’t hurt the population.
Syria sanctions attack the civilian population in the name of holding the government accountable, but just like every other broad sanctions regime in recent history this one does little or nothing to the powerful and well-connected. Starving Afghanistan of resources does nothing to dislodge the Taliban from power, and the same is true in the Syrian case. All that these policies can achieve is to impoverish and kill more ordinary people. This is not speculation. This is what always happens when the U.S. uses the economic weapon against other countries, and it is what has been happening in the targeted countries.
Vohra continues:
Syrians had no expectations from a government that turned their homes, shops, and schools into debris in the first place. But they had hoped that foreign investors might come to their aid, rebuild the country, and allow them to restart their lives. That hope evaporated when the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act came into force in June 2020. The U.S. law threatens sanctions on any entity, American or otherwise, if it provides “significant financial, material, or technological support” to the Syrian government.
There is an idea that keeping cruel sanctions in place provides the U.S. with “leverage,” but this is a rationalization to distract people from the reality of what our policy is doing. How many innocent lives is such “leverage” worth? How many people should be allowed to die preventable deaths so that our government can say that it maintained pressure on the Syrian government? How many millions should be impoverished and turned into refugees? If these are the consequences of our policies, it seems obvious that these policies must end and the “tool” of broad sanctions should never be used again.
Broad sanctions are always wrong because they are indiscriminate and mostly hurt the innocent, but there is something particularly monstrous in seeking to cut off entire economies from the outside world when they are already in terrible shape. Sanctions advocates will often try to argue that the targeted governments are the ones really at fault for the suffering caused by sanctions, but this is another evasion to duck responsibility for what our government is doing to these countries. If someone supports broad sanctions on another country, he is in favor of causing that country’s economic ruin.